Colin Newman of the English punk band Wire uses the words "interesting" and "energy" a lot when he talks about music. "Interesting" can often be a backhanded compliment, but Newman uses it literally because he tends to approach pop as an intellectual endeavor.
It shouldn't be surprising. In their long, punctuated history, Wire has always maintained a progressive approach. The band's first three albums, released between 1977 and 1979, were art punk that appealed to pop people: fast, minimalist, angular and ahistorical. Lyrics were witty and impressionistic and pointedly avoided the sexual and social politics that fueled the punk of their contemporaries. The band broke up and then reunited in the '80s with a more dance-oriented style, refusing to play old songs that had influenced some of the decade's most important bands, from The Minutemen to Sonic Youth to R.E.M. After another break that lasted some 13 years, the quartet -- Newman, guitarist Bruce Gilbert, bassist Graham Lewis, drummer Robert Gotobed -- again reunited in 2000 to cash in on '70s nostalgia, which should have been anathema to the band and in fact was. As Newman points out, opportunism doesn't have to be regressive.
"In the dying days of the '90s we were asked to do a gig at Royal Festival Hall, 2,000-people capacity, part of a series of living legends," Newman says without a hint of irony over the phone from his studio in London. "It's a kind of honor from your culture. Wire have always been critically acclaimed, but we've never been acknowledged in that way, on a high culture level. Obviously, it's a mixed blessing. The Royal Festival Hall is where you have your national film festivals, that sort of thing. So we're suddenly this important cultural institution and we've been invited to do a recital. It's like they want to give people a chance to say, 'Oh, yeah, I saw them before they died.' "